Staff Frontend Engineer (Design Systems & UX)

About Deep Origin

Deep Origin is a biotech startup building an operating system for science that transforms how life science research is conducted. Led by Michael Antonov, co-founder of Oculus, and backed by Formic Ventures, we are redefining the infrastructure behind modern drug discovery. Our AI-driven platform enables scientists to accelerate discovery, reduce cost, and bring breakthrough innovations to life faster. As we scale, engineering excellence is a critical lever in advancing our mission to dramatically reduce disease and extend human healthspan.

Role Description

This is a Staff-level frontend engineering role for someone with strong product and UX judgment. You'll architect and ship the front-end systems behind an operating system for science, while helping define whether the product is actually good to use, not just functional. We don't have a dedicated product design team, so frontend engineers play a direct role in shaping interaction design, usability, and product quality. We want an engineer who can look at a complex scientific workflow, identify what is unclear or inefficient, propose a better direction, and ship high-quality product UI in close collaboration with the team.

As a Staff engineer you set technical direction for the front end: component architecture, the design system, state management patterns, performance budgets, and the standards that keep the codebase coherent as the team and product grow. You also bring strong product and UX judgment to how our tools look, feel, and behave across drug discovery tools, simulation interfaces, data explorers, and research workflows. In this role, frontend architecture and product UX are tightly connected: you help define the point where design quality meets production code. You raise the team’s craft through architecture, shared patterns, code review, pairing, and pragmatic product judgment, helping the team ship interfaces that are coherent, usable, and technically sound.

• 7+ years building production web applications, with deep command of React, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, and a track record of owning front-end architecture from design through ship.
• Real technical leadership. You've set front-end standards, made architecture decisions, and pulled up the engineering bar for a team, not just shipped your own features.
• Strong design instincts and spatial sense. You notice when the padding is off, when a flow has one step too many, when a table is burying the column that matters.
• Experience with data-heavy, workflow-heavy, or tool-heavy products: scientific software, developer tools, analytics platforms, design tools, or similar.
• Comfort with ambiguity. Hand you a loosely defined problem and you'll sketch a few approaches and make the case for one.
• Product thinking at the interaction level. You ask whether the flow makes sense and whether the user has enough context, not just whether the screen looks good.
• Solid front-end fundamentals at scale: state management, responsive and cross-browser work, testing, performance profiling, and clean version control habits.
• Comfort with data visualization past the standard chart library, where the visualization is the interface.
• A portfolio or body of work that shows craft, ideally with code you can talk through.

Nice to have

• Experience with scientific or biotech software.
• Background in or exposure to computational chemistry, biology, or physics, scientific research workflows, or drug discovery.
• Experience establishing design patterns or component standards on a team without dedicated product designers.
• Familiarity with 3D rendering or molecular visualization libraries (e.g., Mol*, NGL, 3Dmol.js) or WebGL.

What This Isn't

• A visual or graphic design role. We're not looking for someone to make marketing assets.
• A design-only role where you hand off specs. You write and ship the code.
• A standard frontend role with a "design eye." The title says Frontend Engineer because you architect and ship code at a Staff level, but you'll be driving UX and design decisions, not implementing someone else's.
• A design manager role. This is hands-on IC work.

What you'll do

• Architect and ship the front end. Lead component architecture, the design system, and shared front-end infrastructure in React and TypeScript. You write reusable, well-tested code that holds up as the team and product grow. You're a committer, not a consultant: you open PRs, review frontend code, and hold the quality bar in the codebase yourself.
• Set front-end technical direction. Drive decisions on state management, rendering strategy, performance budgets, and the patterns that keep the platform coherent, and write the RFCs and reviews that get the rest of the team on the same page.
• Turn ambiguous product intent into concrete UI direction. Pull context from Product, Science, Engineering, leadership, customer feedback, Slack threads, prototypes, and existing workflows. Synthesize that input into clear flows, lightweight specs, implementation plans, and shippable UI.
• Define the UX patterns the platform runs on: Shape patterns for navigation, data display, workflow composition, error and empty states, loading behavior, progressive disclosure, and complex multi-step flows. Turn repeated product needs into reusable component and interaction standards
• Make user flows coherent end to end. Context should carry through each step, the next action should be obvious, and the surrounding UI should help rather than get in the way. The flow has to solve the user's problem, not just look clean.
• Prototype and build production UI for complex scientific workflows: work on multi-step pipelines, parameterized simulations, molecular viewers, results dashboards, and other data-heavy research workflows.
• Work directly with complex scientific and technical data. Understand what a researcher needs to see, how they need to manipulate it, and how to make dense workflows, structured results, simulations, and visualizations understandable and actionable.
• Integrate the front end with backend APIs and distributed platform services. Keep the product reliable and fast across browsers, devices, and environments.
• Treat performance and accessibility as engineering work, not polish. Set performance expectations, chase down bottlenecks, improve accessibility, and pay down UI and technical debt as part of normal product development.
• Find and fix UX debt. Improve screens that were never fully designed, flows that were stitched together over time, and inconsistencies that accumulated as the product evolved.
• Set and evolve frontend engineering standards. Help define expectations for automated testing, code review, CI gates, component quality, accessibility, and maintainability as the platform scales.
• Raise the team’s product and frontend craft. Pair with engineers, review code, share patterns, and make product-quality concerns visible early. Help the whole team build better judgment so quality does not depend on one person being in every conversation.
• Make pragmatic product and interaction decisions. Use strong judgment on layout, hierarchy, motion, and interaction design. When the path is clear, move quickly; when tradeoffs are meaningful, frame the options and drive alignment with Product, Engineering, Science, and leadership.

Values & Working Style

• High agency. You do not wait for perfect specs. You pull context, identify the missing decisions, propose a path forward, and create momentum.
• Ownership. You care about the full path from product intent to production behavior. You stay close to the details until the product works well for users.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can operate in an early, fast-moving company where requirements are incomplete, priorities shift, and the best way to align is often to make the work concrete.
• Clear communicator. You work well with both technical and non-technical people. You can explain tradeoffs, frame options, and make complex product or technical decisions easier to reason about.
• Pragmatism. You optimize for impact, not for being right. You know when to prototype, when to systematize, when to pay down debt, and when to move quickly.
• Bias toward working software. You use prototypes, preview environments, and production code to make product discussions concrete.

Location, Work Authorization & Benefits

• This role requires working onsite in San Francisco at least 3 days per week.
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.
• Competitive compensation package with meaningful equity.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Annual team gatherings and company events.
• Free lunch, snacks, beverages, and onsite gym access (for in-office employees).
• The opportunity to shape the future of health, longevity, and our ability to simulate life.

Why This Role Matters Now

As we scale our AI platform and expand into new scientific initiatives, the quality of our interfaces directly shapes what researchers can accomplish. Complex science becomes more useful when the product makes workflows understandable, decisions clear, and powerful tools accessible. This role sets the craft bar for the frontend engineering and product UX at a point where we're growing fast. The job is making complex science usable, to turn ambiguity into shippable product, and to help the team build interfaces that are coherent, fast, reliable, and worthy of the science behind them.